Various types of packing products heretofore have been used to pack articles in containers for shipment. The packing products have been used to block and brace bulky articles in the containers, to cushion one or more sides of the articles, to wrap articles to provide protection on all sides thereof and/or to fill voids around a contained article.
Crumpled paper products have been used for these various purposes. A particularly desirable crumpled paper product is produced by crumpling one or more plies of sheet stock material, such as kraft paper. The sheet stock material is crumpled and folded upon itself to form lateral pillow portions with a central band therebetween. This crumpled paper product provides advantages such as flexibility whereby the pad can be folded, coiled or otherwise shaped into different configurations, and space efficiency wherein a single roll of stock material may be converted into multiple crumpled paper products.
Sometimes a packing product with greater structural stability and/or load spreading capability is needed for packing particular articles. For example, it is known to pack articles in containers using a packing product having a sandwich construction consisting of one or more pieces of stiff or soft plastic foam between cardboard face sheets. One or both cardboard face sheets may be provided with a die cut opening for capture of the article being packed. One drawback of such type of packing product is its deleterious effect on our environment; the plastic foam is not biodegradable and thus is not environmentally friendly and safe.
Another type of packing product is a honeycomb panel. The honeycomb panel includes a honeycomb core sandwiched between a pair of face sheets. The core, which may be made from kraft paper, has cells with vertically extending walls that are adhesively secured at their ends to the face sheets so that the cell walls are restrained against lateral movement. The honeycomb panel provides advantages such as load distribution capability wherein the face sheets act to distribute a load over a large number of the cells of the honeycomb core. One variation of the honeycomb panel includes a honeycomb core that has a portion of the cell walls compressively deformed in order to make the honeycomb panel more resilient. However, such resiliency exists only over a modest degree of compression of the honeycomb panel, after which the honeycomb panel becomes quite stiff.
Thus, the inventors appreciated that a need exists for a packing product with greater structural stability and/or load spreading capability, while still affording a wide range of resiliency as may be desirable for many packing applications.